Installer now adds Perl/bin directory to the PATH environment variable for Windows 9x.
Windows 9x will need to be rebooted for this to take effect.

The PATH settings are not removed after an uninstallation.

PPM updated to 2.1.2. It now uses SOAP-Lite and has drastically
reduced bandwidth requirements for SUMMARY requests. This is a
prerequisite for supporting the new PPM repository containing most of
CPAN.

Individual patches for each of these changes may also be obtained. See
perlhack.

Perl's newSVrv() API function could result in corrupt data when coercing an
already initialized value to the right type, and could also lead to memory
leaks. Win32::OLE v0.14 tickled these bugs. newSVrv() has been fixed to
resolve these issues.

Perl's optimizer could coredump on stacked assignments involving split(),
such as @a = @b = split(...). This is now fixed.

Windows sockets weren't being initialized correctly in child threads if the
parent already initialized it. This resulted in print() on a socket
created under such conditions not being handled correctly (whereas send()
would do the right thing). The problem has been fixed.

Win32::OLE v0.14 had a bug that could cause strings longer than 256 characters
to be truncated by a single character. This has been corrected.

Individual patches for each of these changes may also be obtained. See
perlhack.

On Unix platforms, ActivePerl is now built with the -Duseithreads
Configure option, just as on Windows. While this provides a functionally
identical perl, it also makes this build binary incompatible with earlier
builds on Unix platforms. If you had installed any extensions (i.e. modules
with XS code) using earlier builds via PPM or otherwise, you will need
to reinstall them under this build. Future builds will maintain binary
compatibility with this one.

On Windows, this build continues to be binary compatible with build 613.

The installation location for the native installations on Unix (RedHat
RPM, Debian dpkg, or Solaris pkgadd) have changed. These packages will
now be installed under /usr/local/ActivePerl-5.6/ rather than under
/usr/local/perl-5.6. This one-time change avoids confusion with locally
installed versions built from the sources, and also avoids installing
on top of existing binary-incompatible build 613 installations.

The installation location can be chosen as usual on Windows, and when
installing using the generic installers on Unix.

On Windows, chdir() could sometimes fail to return failure when given a
non-existent directory, and UNC paths didn't work correctly. These
problems have been corrected.

The libwin32 v0.16 release from CPAN is included for the Windows
builds.

Various small PPM bugs have been fixed.

A bug in PerlScript that prevented it from working under IIS5 on
Windows 2000 has been fixed.

binmode() now supports a second optional argument that can be used
to switch a file handle to ``:crlf'' or ``:raw'' mode. (These correspond
to the traditional text and binary modes.) See perlfunc/binmode.

The new open pragma can be used to set the default mode for
implicitly opened handles in the current lexical scope. This is
useful to set a particular mode for the results of the qx//
operator. See open.

The bundled ActivePerl documentation has been reorganized. Outdated
material has either been reworked to reflect the current status, or
removed when it was no longer applicable.

Build 601 corresponds to Perl 5.005_57. Additional patches available
since 5.005_57 in the public Perl repository have been incorporated.

This build features a major reworking of the API exposed by the
PERL_OBJECT build option. The result is a well-defined Perl API (restricted to
C syntax) that provides very high degree of compatibility for extensions
available from CPAN.

Perl for ISAPI, PerlScript, PerlEz and PerlMsg have been modified to use
the new PERL_OBJECT API.

This series is built around development versions of Perl 5.006. Build 600
corresponds to Perl 5.005_57.

Significant changes that have occurred in the
5.006 development track are documented in perldelta.

Build 600 includes additional changes for supporting globalization. All
Win32 API calls made by Perl now follow the utf8 mode of the interpreter.
Wide versions of the API calls are made when utf8 is in effect. See utf8
for more information on enabling support for Unicode.

use caller provides a way for modules to inherit
the utf8 mode of the calling context. See caller for more information.

The 600 series is not binary compatible with builds in the 500 series. Any
extensions built using binaries from the ActivePerl 500 series will need
to be recompiled. Note especially that this applies to PPDs that may have
been built for 500 series builds.